Modern telecommunication systems, such as Next Generation Networks (NGNs), provide many media-rich services for mass markets. To provide these services, these networks implement media servers to source multimedia content from a provider network to user endpoint devices. Thus, the scalability of the telecommunication system is highly dependent on efficient media flows between the media servers and the corresponding user endpoint devices. However, conventional telecommunication systems often take an ad hoc approach to establishing media sessions between a user endpoint device and a media server. This approach often can lead to a media flow unnecessarily traversing a given network link within the provider network two or more times between the media server and the user endpoint device. This backtracking, or “hairpin”, in the media flow within the provider network has a significant dampening effect on media flows and thus limits scalability of the telecommunication system.
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